The Sword of Michael - eARC by Marcus Wynne Page B

hour later someone knocked on my door. It was his father.”
    Tony paused to sip his coffee. His mouth twisted as though it had suddenly gone sour.
    “He was just like the son?” I said.
    “Worse,” Tony said. “Everything about him…eyes, even how he smelt…something was just wrong about him. What made it so uncomfortable, though that word doesn’t do it justice, was how arrogant he was, like everything he wanted was already decided in advance.”
    “Decided about what?”
    “He wanted me to move out. He said I was disturbing his son, his son was special, his son was sensitive. He was important, he knew people, he was a banker…Nothing about me being an invalid, nothing about me minding my own business…it was all about him and what he wanted…”
    I nodded. I got that. The self-centeredness, the whole Service-to-Self orientation before anything or anyone else, is the single most significant indicator of deep-seated possession and allegiance to the Dark Forces.
    Evil.
    The second most significant is the adherence to the Lie. Satan got his handle as The Father of Lies for a reason. A brilliant Catholic writer named M. Scott Peck wrote a book called People Of The Lie which was his take on that indicator of evil, how to define it and how to identify it in others early on.
    “What else did he say?” I said.
    “I told him the truth. I wasn’t bothering anyone. He was the one with the problem.”
    “I take it he didn’t like that answer.”
    Tony laughed. “No. He didn’t.”
    “And then…other things started to happen?” I prompted.
    Tony stared at me. His eyes were sunken and surrounded by bruised flesh. Deep in there I saw a flash of something staring back at me, something quickly hidden, and I felt my guides gather round me…
    …Possession, cording, curse, thought form…tended. Definitely tended…
    That meant that somewhere a demon or a sorcerer—or both—were watching through Tony’s eyes, tending the possession through an energetic cord.
    I drew a deep breath and silently called on the angelic realm, The Mighty Warriors of Light on Earth, and Michael and Uriel, the two mighty archangels who honored me with their assistance. I felt the energy shift, a brightening, and saw through my half-closed eyes the darkness above and behind Tony ease as the angelic realm arrived, and awaited the Work that was yet to be done…
    “Yes,” Tony said. “I saw his father hanging around with someone else. They were searching outside the apartment building. Like they were looking for something or someone.”
    “This was while you were at home?”
    “Yes. I was always at home. Then I started hearing them outside my door. They’d stand out there and talk about things that could happen, how people could fall down stairs and get hurt. Then someone went through my laundry and some of my clothing disappeared.”
    “Do you remember what disappeared?”
    “Some underwear, boxer shorts, and an old T-shirt.”
    “Did you ever find them?”
    “No.”
    This was shaping up to be something more than run-of-the-mill possession. Clothing, especially natural fibers worn next to the skin, build up an energetic charge. After so much immersion in a human energy field, they become infused with the energy. So if you have a piece of clothing that someone has worn for a long time, you have a piece of that person’s energy. A sorcerer can work with that energy, treat the clothing as though it’s part of you, since for energetic purposes it is part of you until it’s cleared by time or sunlight or direct focused intention.
    Tony wasn’t just the victim of an active possession; he was the victim of a curse, a focused one deliberately made with skill and knowledge and technique; a curse tended now by the maker of it, and somewhere, that maker was becoming agitated. I saw with the shamanic vision that is part of my Gift a ripple in the energy field of the suffering man seated across from me, a ripple reflected in the muscles of